Review: The Spirit of Hitchcock, Distilled Into Dance

A good book or festival could now be assembled about the works of art that have been inspired by the films of Alfred Hitchcock. There are, for example, the opera of “Notorious,” the play “Hitchcock Blonde,” the films “Hitchcock” and “The Girl.”

I’ve also seen some remarkable works of dance theater that are complex reactions to Hitchcock movies: Ian Spink’s “Further and Further Into Night” (1984) and Matthew Bourne’s “Deadly Serious” (1992). Now to that list, I add a third: Sally Silvers’s “Tenderizer,” a world premiere at Roulette.

Ms. Silvers has been choreographing since the 1980s. Some of her work can be dismissed as “quirky” or with whatever patronizing terms are sometimes applied to the work of female artists before it’s consigned to oblivion. Except that I can’t quite forget it. The first work of the Roulette program, “The Big Now,” performed by Ms. Silvers and three dancers no longer in their first youth, is the peculiar, idiosyncratic Silvers I remember from 25 years ago. But the program’s other two offerings, “If You Try” and “Tenderizer,” are — while entirely and wonderfully eccentric — important contributions to dance theater.

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CreditPaula Court

“If You Try” claims the attention in its very opening image. Its trio of barefoot women — Lindsey Jones, Alicia Ohs, Veraalba Santa — stand with backs to the audience and join hands, behind their shoulders, in a singular, knotlike pattern. The music is a collage (by Bruce Andrews) of pop-rock music; it kindles the energies of these three fabulously unorthodox and assertive dancers. A juicily shaking rubber-knee image stays in memory.

“Tenderizer,” occasionally accompanied by screened fragments of Hitchcock’s “Marnie,” “The Birds” and “Psycho,” plunges into, and abstracts, their psychological dramas. There are no plots; no props, either. But the body language is brilliantly loaded with apprehension, turmoil, danger. And even if you’ve seen the superb dancers before — Alexandra Berger, Brandon Collwes, Dylan Crossman, Ms. Jones, Caleb Teicher and Melissa Toogood — this choreography makes you feel that, as Hitchcock’s inspired casting often did with star actors, you’re seeing unsuspected sides of them.

Four features especially distinguish Ms. Silvers’s choreography here. One is footwork (bare feet, often stepping on half-toe, sometimes hopping powerfully with full use of the heel); another is eyes (subtly made up, often looking sideways and showing their whites); a third is balance (a dancer on one foot will tip this way and that without falling). Fourth: Whole sequences occur with the dancers’ backs to the audience; they project, but not facially. We’re taken into the mysteries that they themselves address.

The conflicted body language of the final solo for Mr. Collwes seems a darkly lyrical expression of the Norman Bates character in “Psycho.” No camp, no ham, but beauty, terror, confusion and high intensity.

Correction:

An earlier version of this review misidentified the arranger of the music collage accompanying the dance “If You Try.” It is Bruce Andrews, not Michael Schumacher.